AlFan recently released his displacement maps for Genesis 3 Female. These are wonderful maps as they provide those little creases in the knees, elbows, feet, hands, and torso that even young women have. DAZ's HD technology doesn't quite get there with those details. Unfortunately, we all know that displacement maps don't play well in Luxrender. That is if we use them as displacement maps. They work superbly if we use them as bump maps, and blend them with normal maps using the Math option.

Staggering level of detail, huh? He provides maps for Arms, Face, Legs, and Torso. They are sized 4096 x 4096.

AlFan's maps are Tiffs. The first thing to do is open them in GIMP or Photoshop, and change them to Jpegs. Most of our other textures maps are Jpegs. It has been my experience that sometimes Jpegs clash with Tiffs or PNGs. No point in running that risk.

Export them to an easy to find file, because you can apply them to any character who wears the G3F UV map. AlFan has a set specifically for the V7 UV map, if that is your preference.

Change the name to something like Creases Arms, AlFan Face, or Wrinkles Torso. Do not include displacement or disp in the name. I found out the hard way that Luxrender will see it as a displacement map and warp the geometry, even if it isn't in the displacement map channel. Oopsie.

For the sake of clarity, I'll call them AlFan maps from now on, to distinguish them from use as displacement maps.

Last edited by Nathanomir on Mon Oct 31, 2016 6:17 pm, edited 4 times in total.

This assumes you have normal maps for your characters. If not, this technique should work when blended with bump maps, but I haven't tested those and don't know the parameters.

All of my normal maps for G3F are baked at 7% in ShaderMap. That provides the details of the map without the pores "grapefruiting" in Reality. In Reality, I run the maps at 100%. That's just my way of doing it, but it will affect the final settings as presented.

In Reality, go to the Bump Map channel. Select Math option.

Set Function to Add.

In Texture A, load the appropriate AlFan map.

In Texture B, load the normal map for your character.

Standard practice for this sort of bump-normal blending in Math is to set Texture A at an amount of .0008, and Texture B at 1.

Texture B is fine at 1. For this application, .0008 is too low for Texture A. Bump maps have more contrast, covering a wider spectrum from black to white. The AlFan maps are closer to neutral gray: 160, 160, 160. For a bump map, neutral gray is flat. So, we need increase the strength of the AlFans to get them to show up. It doesn't take much.

I found an amount of .0012 to be ideal (at least when blended with these normals). For older characters, you can increase the strength as high as .0020. The minor creases will pop out at that level, but heck, so do mine at my age. If you find my example a little extreme for your tastes, lower the strength of the AlFan maps to your liking. An increment of .0001 either way yields dramatic results.

The strength of both maps combined is 100%.

Your settings will vary, depending on how you made your normal maps, and the details of the original bump you used to make the normal. So, play with the settings to get the look you want.

Personally, I think the knee creases should be more pronounced (same with the elbows). To accomplish that, it's better to darken the needed creases on the map itself in GIMP or Photoshop than increase the strength of the map in Reality.